Читать книгу The Gamification of Society - Группа авторов - Страница 9

Writing about gamification is a paradox which is not only related to the term but also to considering that such a term can be used as if it was a concept; the uses of the term are in no way stabilized. The question is intensified for me by the fact that, in French (my mother tongue), the term gamification has imposed itself without being translated, and none of the proposed translations having met with great success¹.

We may wonder about its rapid revival by the academic world. Is it a fear of missing out on the en vogue concept? The academic world has been criticized for its reaction time in the face of new phenomena, as was the case with video games, and one wonders if this is not going too fast now. Admittedly, this revival can be critical and, in accordance with ambient fashions, it is often a matter of deconstructing the notion of gamification; the problem is that this deconstruction took place even before the concept was constructed. Perhaps this is a beautiful metaphor for our (post)modernity, where one would have all the less stability of thought, the more destruction would precede construction.

Gamification is not, for me, a concept but a phenomenon, a practice (partly linguistic) to be studied and not to be deconstructed because the uses of the notion are very varied and there is nothing truly constructed that can be deconstructed. And one quickly arrives at a set of paradoxes that I will try to highlight before proposing alternatives for thinking about this question.